Major broadcast networks declined to give President Donald Trump’s midterm convention wall-to-wall coverage on Wednesday night, opting for their regularly scheduled programming.
ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, the latter of which aired the NFL’s season opener, did not air the programming in full. Cable news networks, including Fox News, CNN, and MS NOW, also did not air the event in full.
Even the far-right Newsmax didn’t care to air the convention’s programming in full during its primetime programming, instead opting for segments on some of the greatest hits of the right-wing culture wars with headlines like “When You Go Woke, You Broke” and airing grievances about Seattle Police and CBS News’s Gayle King.
Fox News tuned in to hear remarks from several MAGA speakers, but still had its anchors covering other news before Trump took the stage.
The three conservative cable channels, Fox, Newsmax, and One America News Network, did air the president’s remarks uninterrupted, in full, even as they snubbed some of the other speakers from uninterrupted coverage.
Online interest in the convention was also low, suggesting many Americans tuned out of the big night.
Convention livestreams during the president’s speech also suggest online viewership hovered between the hundreds and low thousands for several outlets streaming the night, including the MAGA-aligned RightSide Broadcasting Network, ABC News Live, and Fox News.
Even on the ground, turnout on the first day of what has been called “Trump-a-Palooza” appeared lower than Trump expected.
The Trumpy spectacle kicked off to a largely empty arena in Dallas. Thousands of empty chairs were seen in the American Airlines Center, which has a capacity of roughly 20,000 people, as some of the D-list MAGA speakers began their remarks.
The venue filled up more ahead of the president’s big speech, but it still wasn’t entirely full for his remarks. Before the event, he had been insistent that the event had “sold out” and “everybody wants to be there.”
The crowd-size-obsessed president may have been oblivious to the empty seats as he told the audience, “Not only is this packed, but you have an equal number of people standing outside... We have an amazing response. They love our party. They love what we’re doing.”
There was, in fact, just about nobody trying to get in from the outside while the president made such a claim.
He doubled down on the falsity in a Truth Social post claiming that there were “thousands of people outside who couldn’t get in,” because, as he put it, “I guess people LOVE TRUMP POLITICS!”
Trump is speaking again on Thursday evening. What exactly there could be left of him to talk about remains unclear, as his speech on Wednesday ended up being 106 minutes, an hour longer than scheduled.
In typical Trump fashion, he claimed online that his speech drew a record-breaking number of viewers.
“It was really something, streaming all over the place, and really big numbers, despite going up against the NFL. The overall numbers beat the NFL. The Arena, which was really nice, beat its own attendance records,” Trump asserted on his Truth Social platform.
The views for the NFL kickoff game between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks have not yet been released. Around 28 million people tuned in for last season’s NFL opener, so it seems unlikely Trump broke that record, given the low interest in airing the president’s event on networks and streaming services.
